Editorial: Broun should keep low profile in U.S. Capitol

Posted: Thursday, July 26, 2007

Congratulations are due to U.S. Rep. Paul Broun on his hard-fought and well-earned win in the race for the 10th Congressional District seat. If all goes as the Wednesday afternoon news release from his campaign indicated it would, the Watkinsville physician will be waking up this morning as the officially sworn-in congressman for a big chunk of eastern Georgia, including Athens-Clarke and Oconee counties.

Broun managed an impressive feat in earning the seat. All across the sprawling district, which stretches from the Augusta area north into the mountain counties of Northeast Georgia, Broun tapped into rank-and-file Republican and conservative disgust at the idea they were expected to meekly line up behind the state GOP establishment's choice for the seat, tire dealer and former state senator Jim Whitehead.

Locally, Broun was able to parlay Whitehead's obvious affinity for the Augusta end of the district into ballots from a variety of voters - independent, conservative, and, yes, liberal - who were justifiably worried that the needs and concerns of this area would be lost in the shuffle if Whitehead earned the seat.

Even with those dynamics at work, however, it was a narrow victory for Broun, who squeaked into a face-off with Whitehead just ahead of the first-place Democrat in the 10-candidate June 19 election, and took the July 17 runoff by 394 votes, well within the margin in which Whitehead could have sought a recount.

Thus, Broun enters the U.S. House with nothing even remotely resembling a mandate, as a member of the minority party, and with a little less than a year before the next election - a primary in which he is all but certain to face opposition from an establishment GOP candidate, with backers made immeasurably wiser by Whitehead's loss. And, if he makes it through the primary, Broun is also all but certain to face Democratic opposition in next year's general election.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Broun's best bet for retaining the seat is to remember that fully one-third of the votes that put him in office came from Athens-Clarke and Oconee counties, and that other counties in the immediate area, most notably Jackson, Madison and Oglethorpe, also went heavily for him.

While it's certain that a number of voters in those counties responded to Broun's ultraconservative stances, from his support of the FairTax to his strict constructionist stand on the Constitution, it's also certain that many, if not most, of those voters cast ballots for Broun not because of his conservative credentials, but for the far simpler reason that he wasn't Jim Whitehead.

As he embarks on his service in the 110th Congress, Broun should know that the deepest expectations held for him by a wide swath of the people responsible for putting him in office are that he completes his upcoming months of service without embarrassing himself or the people of the 10th District. He should endeavor to get a seat at the table for discussions of the eventual site of the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility, for which Athens-Clarke County is in the running, but beyond that, Broun should maintain a low profile in Congress.

And in that light, here's hoping that Broun - or, at least, the members of his staff - have the good sense not to return any calls they might get from the Comedy Central cable network's "Daily Show" or "Colbert Report."